The Malazan Empire Series: (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne, Blood and Bone, Assail) (Novels of the Malazan Empire)

by Ian C. Esslemont

Hiam raised a hand in agreement. ‘Yes, Quint. Yes. But what’s done is done. We cannot conjure up any further men or women. We can expect only some three thousand spears from Jourilan and Dourkan. That puts our strength for the coming season at some twenty thousand spears of active-service men and women. Twenty-five, if we pressed every possible standing body. Including, I suppose, even our Master Engineer Stimins.’

  Despite the news, Quint barked a laugh at that vision. ‘It may be all worth it just to see that. But,’ and he slid a hand up from within his cloak to stroke his gouged chin between thumb and forefinger, ‘as you say, there seems nothing to discuss in all this. What’s done is done.’

  ‘Yes. There’s nothing to discuss,’ and the Lord Protector’s expression hardened, ‘save how we will respond to the fact that we are now below half-strength for the coming season.’

  Quint shrugged easily. ‘Then there is nothing to discuss. We will defend. We are the Chosen, the Stormguard. Ours is a sacred responsibility to defend all the lands.’

  Hiam pushed himself from the wall, nodding. ‘Very good, Quint. I knew that would be your answer. I merely wanted to have this out in the open between us. We are in complete agreement. We fight. We defend to the last man and woman. There is no alternative.’ He squeezed Quint’s shoulder, peered about the chamber. ‘You know this tower is named Ruel’s Tears because a millennium ago the Lord Protector of the time, Ruel, was said to have thrown himself from this very window after having been overcome by some terrible vision?’

  Quint nodded; he’d heard the legend.

  ‘Some say his vision was of the ultimate defeat of the Stormguard. Had you heard that?’

  Quint could only pinch his chin savagely; he’d heard that whispered a time or two.

  Looking off as if he could see beyond the walls of the small chamber, Hiam said softly, ‘I never could understand such a reaction, Quint. All I feel is admiration. I sometimes think that if I were to die of anything, it would be of unbearable pride …’ He smiled then, looking away. ‘Very good, Wall Marshal. We are in accordance.’ And he started down the stairs.

  Only later, long after he and Hiam had walked in silence completing the day’s inspection tour, did it occur to Quint that the discussion of Ruel’s Tears in truth had not at all been for Hiam to test his reaction to the news of this season’s shorthandedness; rather, it had been to reassure him, Quint, of Hiam’s own steadfast resolve in the face of such news.

  For it was not in Quint’s nature ever to bend or to waver – neither the butt nor the blade allowed for that. However, in the months ahead he may come to wonder on the like determination of his Lord Protector. And Hiam had just neatly anticipated and eliminated any such misgivings on the part of his second in command. As he hung his cloak and sat watching the fire in the common room of the Tower of Kor, it occurred to Quint that perhaps there was more than met the eye to the indefinable quality that made Hiam the Lord Protector.

  Rillish was playing with his toddler, Halgin, in the courtyard of his house just outside the hamlet of Halas when a column of Malazan cavalry came up the dirt road from the village. Straightening, he motioned the nanny to take the lad then walked out to meet them. They took their time. The grey dust of west Cawn coated their travelling cloaks and the sweaty flanks of their mounts. As they drew closer Rillish could see by the torc high on the leader’s arm that the commander was a captain, which was unusual for such a small detachment. His wife, Talia, broad with child, appeared at his side. ‘You needn’t come out,’ he told her. ‘It’s nothing, I’m sure.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be here for nothing,’ she said grimly.

  The captain motioned a halt and nodded a greeting. She pulled off her gloves and batted the dust from her cloak. ‘Fist Rillish Jal Keth?’

  ‘That promotion was honorary only. I’m retired.’

  The captain pulled off her helmet and the padded leather hood beneath. She was fair, startlingly so, her long white-blonde hair tightly braided. For the life of him Rillish could not place her background. Few on Quon were so pale, and there was something in her voice, the accent unusual.

  ‘That retirement was voluntary. Under terms of service you are still in reserve. The Empire, sir, did not let you go.’

  ‘That fat toad on the throne …’ Talia hissed beneath her breath.

  Rillish raised a hand for quiet. ‘I’m sorry, Captain, but there must be some misunderstanding. Firm agreements were made in the terms of my service and retirement. I am finished with the Empire.’

  The captain gave a judicious nod. ‘That may be true, sir. But, as I say, the Empire may not be finished with you.’

  Talia’s hand found his, hot and sweaty. He squeezed. ‘There is nothing, Captain, that could induce me to return.’

  ‘Nothing?’ The captain peered about the yard, the modest garden plot, the fields, the paddock of horses, before finally returning to him. ‘Perhaps there is somewhere we can talk, sir?’

  Rillish shrugged. ‘Well, we can go for a walk if you wish.’ He released Talia’s hand. ‘But I believe you’ve come a long way to no profit. You may water the mounts, of course, and perhaps we can find something for your troop.’

  ‘You are kind, sir.’ She turned to the detachment. ‘Stand down. See to the horses.’

  Dismounted, the woman was as tall as Rillish, and far older than he’d thought, perhaps close to his own fifty. The lines around the eyes and mouth gave her age away. ‘And you are?’

  She saluted. ‘Peleshar is my full name, but I go by Peles. At your service, Fist.’

  Rillish let the rank reference pass. ‘Peleshar … an unusual name …’

  She nodded. ‘I am from south Genabackis.’

  Rillish was surprised and impressed. ‘You served in One-Arm’s host?’

  ‘No, sir. I saw action in the Free City campaigns. Then I served in the liaison contingent to the Moranth.’

  Even more impressive. A record of service that should warrant a rank far higher than captain. And the Free City campaigns – those went far back indeed. He managed to stop himself from being so gauche as to ask just how far back, and invited the captain to accompany him.

  ‘I’ll see what we can pull together for the troopers,’ Talia said, her gaze hard on the captain.

  Peles bowed. ‘My thanks.’

  They stopped at the paddock. Suspicious of the stranger, the horses snorted and edged away. The captain studied them with admiration. ‘Fine mounts. They are Wickan?’

  Watching the horses as well, Rillish smiled his affection. ‘Yes. You are in the cavalry?’

  A laugh. ‘Fanderay, no. I have had little exposure to horses. My people are not riders. We have other … specialties. I am a commander of marines.’

  Rillish nodded, brushed drying bark from the still-green wood of the fence. ‘So, Captain. Why are you here?’

  ‘I am only the messenger, of course. I was asked to deliver this.’ She held out a slim, tightly bound scroll. ‘I am told it is from Emperor Mallick’s own hand.’

  Rillish regarded it without moving. For a moment he feared it was poisoned. Then he mocked himself, thinking, why would the man bother when he could just dispatch his Claw assassins to kill them in their sleep? He took the scroll, broke the seal, and read.

  It was a long time before he lowered the short note.

  Captain Peles had not moved nor spoken the whole time. She had merely watched the horses, her surprisingly thick forearms resting on the paddock fence. Patient, this one. We might get along at that. Rillish returned the scroll. ‘Very well, Captain. I accept. As he knew I would, no doubt.’

  ‘Yes, Fist. So I was told.’

  Rillish turned to face the yard where his wife and the servants were sharing out bread and cold meats. ‘Now the hard part, Captain.’

  She nodded, clearing her throat. ‘I’ll ready my men and women.’

  Before he even got close enough to speak, she knew. Her face stiffened and she turned away to enter the house without a word. Rillish follo
wed, but she was gone, fled to some back room. He went to the storeroom where his gear lay rolled in leather. He dug about for his blades, his father’s old Untan two-edged longswords. He found them under the shelves, wrapped in oiled rags. When he straightened she was in the doorway. Tears glistened on her cheeks.

  ‘What did he offer?’

  ‘Everything.’

  She gestured savagely to the surroundings, the house, the yard. ‘You have everything you need here – don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She wiped the tears from her face. ‘Isn’t it enough?’

  ‘Yes.’ He closed to hold her but she backed away. ‘This is all I need, Talia. But he offered to give it all back – everything. How could I refuse?’

  Her mouth tightened to a slit and she spat, ‘We don’t want it.’

  He lowered his gaze, pulled one blade a short way from its scabbard, then shoved it home. When he looked up she was gone.

  Captain Peles had halted her detachment a short way down the dirt road. With the help of his foreman, Rillish saddled his favourite mount, then led it out into the yard. Here Halgin waited with his nanny. When the toddler saw him he broke free to run. Rillish knelt to hold his shoulders. The lad peered up, his gaze as blue and open as the sky. Rillish kissed his forehead. He could hardly find his voice. ‘I’m going away for a time, son. What I’m doing, I’m doing for you, and for little Nil or Nether to come. I want you to know that I love you more than I could ever say. Goodbye for now.’

  He straightened but Halgin grabbed his leg and would not let go. In the end the nanny came to pull the howling lad away. Mounting, Rillish searched for Talia but didn’t see her anywhere. That hurt, but he teased the reins to start down the road.

  When he reached the detachment, Captain Peles raised her chin to motion back behind him and he turned. She stood there. The captain signed for her detachment to move on.

  He watched her. For the longest time they remained unmoving, studying one another over the stretch of dusty dirt road between, she motionless beside the unfinished gate to their little yard hemmed in by the house and paddock. Such a small allotment, hardly enough to get by, let alone prosper. He thought of his family’s many estates in Unta. The largest, hard by the Gris border, a man could not cross in a full day’s riding. All that had been his before the Insurrection, before his choice to side against the Empress’s edicts on the Wickan pogrom had stripped him of it. Now the Emperor offered it all back for his return to active duty – and just where, he believed he knew. And he’d accepted. Not for himself of course, but for Halgin. It would be his legacy now. He hoped his son would have better luck of it than he or his father before him.

  He raised a hand in farewell and she answered, slowly. He lowered his arm and turned away.

  In the end Kiska had no idea why she agreed to Agayla’s request that she accompany her up-island for a walk among the windswept hills. Perhaps it was the daytime sight of the Deadhouse: if anything even more foreboding in the full glare of the sun and even more unsettling to her senses now than she remembered from her youth.

  Could this tomb-like dilapidated hulk really be of the Azath? A mysterious network of dwellings, caves or houses, call them what you would – structures, of some sort – that some claimed pervade creation? All she knew of them was what she had overheard speculated about in Tayschrenn’s presence, and that precious little. In fact, she remembered scholars who had approached Tayschrenn for his knowledge of them and their outrage at his opinion that the Azath were not a matter for human investigation. ‘They are waning,’ she heard him say once. ‘We should let them go in peace.’

  She rested a hand on the low wall of piled fieldstones surrounding the house’s grounds and thought of another night, seemingly so long ago, when she had faced the brooding presence last. That night saw the only known successful assault upon an Azath; and that by the most cunning – and probably most insane – mage of their time. The Emperor himself. All other would-be assailants through the ages, human, daemon, Jaghut, now crowded the many mounds humping the dead grounds, enslaved to the house.

  Agayla was probably right. Perhaps but for the older woman’s intervention she too would now be rotting within one of those burial mounds. That would have been the most likely outcome. Too perilous a throw by far. She turned away to head to the river road to join Agayla for their walk. She would spend the day with her then say her farewells. Another tack, then, towards finding Tayschrenn. Genabackis, perhaps. The Moranth may be of help.

  Leaving, she noticed an old man squatting against a stone wall across the way; his great thick arms hung over his knees, and a white thatching of scars criss-crossed his bald pate. The man’s gaze followed her as she left. She thought he looked vaguely familiar: probably from her youth on the island.

  She met Agayla just outside the town proper, where allotments and garden plots widened and irrigation channels of set slate bordered the flint road. The fields were dull now with dead stalks. Low bruised clouds pressed overhead, cast up from the south, the Strait of Storm. The chill winds hinted at worse to come.

  Her aunt carried a wicker basket on one arm, a shawl over her shoulders. ‘Remind you of the old days?’ she asked, and brushed wayward strands from her face.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Agayla headed off without comment in her swift energetic walk that Kiska recalled from those old days. Following, she pulled her thick lined cloak tighter and felt about for her gloves. After a time she called, ‘Mushrooming, are we?’

  ‘A little late for that. Roots mainly. Some stalks. Like the arrow.’

  Kiska wouldn’t know an arrow plant if it jabbed her in the eye.

  They climbed inland. Agayla struck off the road, following a narrow dirt path that wound between low brush. Looking back, Kiska caught glimpses of the town and the bay beyond before it was cut from view by an intervening hillock. She began to wonder just how far her aunt intended to take them.

  At last she pushed through a dense stand of alder, their limbs cast backwards by the constant sea winds, to find Agayla sitting on a lump of rock before a circle of tall standing stones.

  ‘There you are!’ her aunt announced, patting the rock next to her. ‘Come sit with me.’

  Kiska shrugged within her heavy cloak and came to stand next to her aunt. ‘Agayla,’ she began, awkwardly. ‘This has been … pleasant. But I really must be getting back to town …’

  The woman raised a hand for silence. ‘Shh. It’s almost time. Now sit.’ She produced an apple from the basket.

  Kiska grudgingly sat. ‘Time for what?’

  ‘This circle is sacred to many gods. Did you know that?’ Before Kiska could reply, she continued, ‘In the old days people were sacrificed here.’

  Kiska eyed her aunt, wondering what the old woman was on about. Her mind wasn’t starting to meander in her old age, was it? She bit into the apple.

  ‘Ah … here we are.’

  But Kiska had felt it too. She stood, dropping the apple, and slipped her hands into her cloak to rest where twin long-knives hung sheathed tightly to her sides. A shimmering was climbing between the stones … a wavering curtain of opalescent light. It fluttered to life around the circle’s full circumference.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Mind your manners now,’ Agayla said. She was pushing back her hair, adjusting her shawl.

  Kiska eyed her, mistrustful. ‘What’s going on?’

  Agayla stood before her, looked her up and down then gently laid a hand on her cheek. The palm was warm, smooth, and dry. It seemed as if the woman was examining her face for something and Kiska had no idea what it was she sought. ‘We are about to speak to one of the greatest powers presently at play here in this world,’ she began. ‘No – hush. Many name her a goddess but to me she is more, and I suppose less, than that. Not like Burn or Fanderay or Togg. Not some ancient entity or force that has come to represent what we choose to cast upon it. She remains a real living person whose influence transcends othe
rs’ because she is here, now, and can intervene directly as she sees fit.’ She gave Kiska’s chin a squeeze and gently edged her head side to side. ‘So behave yourself. Speak only when you are spoken to. Bow. Show some of those fancy manners you should have learned in Unta.’

  The woman released her and Kiska shook her head as if to recover from some spell or blow. Greater influence than the gods’? What could her aunt possibly be on about? She eyed the shimmering barrier. ‘Who then? What mage?’

  Agayla laughed. ‘Oh, Kiska. Not some mage or magus. The greatest. The Enchantress. The Mistress of Thyr. The Queen of Dreams.’ And she took her niece’s hand and led her through the curtain of light.

  The brilliant glare momentarily blinded Kiska, and as she blinked to clear her vision she slowly became aware of her surroundings. It was the circle of standing stones she knew, but surrounded by a shimmering reflective silver border. And, standing at its centre waiting to meet them, a woman wrapped in loose pale blue cloth that was draped about her in countless folds. Kiska held back, dazzled by the vision of this diminutive, slim, raven-haired beauty. How could this be real? She’d heard that this woman walked with Anomander generations ago. Yet was she not the greatest enchantress of the age? She could appear as she wished and this was her choice; it was up to her, Kiska, to take from it what she would.

  Agayla shared no such hesitation. She knelt before the woman, murmured something that sounded close to an invocation. But the Enchantress laughed and raised her up with her hands, saying, ‘Do not kneel before me, Agayla. Surely you of all people have not fallen to the cult of worship.’

  Agayla bowed. ‘I give homage where I choose, m’lady.’

  The Enchantress turned her glance upon Kiska. ‘So this is the one.’

  The force of the woman’s attention struck her like a blow. Kiska found she could not order her thoughts. It was as if she were standing before a titanic waterfall or a storm front at sea; all she could do was stare, awestruck by the vision.